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Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: Lauren Working, "The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Description: In his Relation of the second voyage to Guiana, published in 1596, George Chapman put the imperial ambitions of England into a telling verse couplet. ‘Riches, and Conquest, and Renowne I sing. / Riches with honour, Conquest without bloud’. For the metropolitan gentlemen of early 17th-century London, the colonising project in Virginia was deeply bound up with the tastes and social lives of statesmen. Chapman’s reference to riches and honour signal English ambitions at the outset of a colonising project in which the interior worlds of the state were profoundly transformed.In The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civili...